Gaga and lyrics

I wouldn't call myself a "Little Monster", but I do like Lady Gaga's music for the most part.  The Fame had a great front half and a pretty iffy back half -- "Boys Boys Boys" is awful, even as a ripoff of "Girls Girls Girls" by Motley Crüe (which is a much better song), and "Brown Eyes" is booooooring, but "Again Again" has a great rollicking bar sound and "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich" is catchy as hell.  The Fame Monster was overall a more solid album, though not uncoincidentally it was only 8 tracks long.  Born This Way is better than The Fame, though the bonus songs were almost all crap, and it gets tiring to listen to, not so much for its message, but because there are so many layers piled up of different sound effects on so many songs.




But I overall like her melodic patterns, and how she definitely seems to have a knack for earworms, and I don't think her reliance on nonsense syllables is overdone yet.  And I like how all of her albums so far have had at least one song that's a bit more acoustic/"traditional" so to speak than the rest, and I like the influences you can hear in those songs.  It tells me that she's a performer who cares about music in general, not just her image or fame or money or anything.  I don't think there is anything inherently WRONG with being a music performer who doesn't prioritize music first; it just seems that I am wowed more frequently by musicians that do.  Plus, it's fun to sing her stuff, probably because I have a very similar vocal range as her.

What I wish she'd work on more though, and maybe she will in her new album ARTPOP though I kind of doubt it, is her lyrics.  Gaga clearly is the master of her own career, which is kind of astounding for how early  along she is in it, and her fingerprints (pawprints) are all over every song she does.  But it seems like she can write a song, and she can write lyrics (less successfully), but she can't find a good way to meld the two.  As an example, here's a couple verses from "Marry the Night":

                                         I'm gonna 
Marry the dark          |               Gonna make
Love to the stark       |                    I'm a
Soldier to my       own | Emptiness, I'm         a
Winner

                                         I'm gonna
Lace up my boots        |            Throw on some
Leather and cruise      |                 Down the
Streets that I love, in | My fishnet gloves, I'm a
Sinner

So you can see where she put the rhymes (dark/stark, my/I'm, boots/cruise, love/gloves).  But in the rhythm of the song, it doesn't even make any sense.  Nobody, if they were speaking these lines aloud casually, would say "I'm gonna marry the dark.  Gonna make love to the stark.  I'm a soldier to my -- own emptiness I'm -- a winner." or "Throw on some leather and cruise... down the streets that I love"  They're either rhymes that she forced for the sake of her rhythmic pattern, or they're lines that she was in love with and didn't really give a shit whether they fit the rhythm or not.

Also - the other problem with Gaga lyrics, aside from scanning, is the fact that she arranges words in a weird way.  Almost like an ESL kind of way, except obviously she is not ESL.  What the hell does "gonna make love to the stark" or "soldier to my own emptiness" mean?  I mean, I know metaphorically what she was going for, but it's such a weird way of saying it.  There are plenty of much more sensical ways she could have phrased that, but then, those ways wouldn't have rhymed.  In that case, why force it?  Why not just toss the verse and try to think of a whole new set of lines to get the same point across?

Or here's another example, from "Bloody Mary".  Spacing weirdness is mine, to emphasize how this is actually sung:

We    are | not   just | art for Michelang-|-  elo to
Carve, he | can't   re | write the aggro   | of my furied
Heart, I  | wait    on | mountaintops in   | Paris cold, je ne
Pas  mou- | -rir  teut | seule

Again.  Weird scanning, and weird word choice.  "He can't rewrite the aggro of my furied heart?" What the Christ.  I appreciate the effort to be different and have the rhyme at the start of the line rather than the end (carve/heart/pas), but it's just awkward to sing.

Or from "Scheisse":

Blonde high-heeled | Fem-in-ist, en-listing | Femmes for this

Again - creative but awkward rhyme location (feminist/femmes for this), but word arrangement is just uncomfortable.

Gaga.  You're not a poet.  Find an arty-but-sensible English professor and have him proofread things for you.  You're going to be remembered for a while as it is for your image and your melodies, but if you can get your lyrics under control (put down the thesaurus!!) you are going to be a legend.